Telstra is the largest telecommunications company in Australia. Its business includes wired communications, ADSL, HFC, satellite, CDMA and GSM digital mobile networks. In addition, Telstra is Australia's leading ISP. During the past years, Telstra has made a plan for supporting long term strategic priorities to: improve customer satisfaction, retain and grow the existing customer base, simplify the business and invest in new growth businesses. These strategies reflect the focus of satisfying customers through the acquisition of greater financial benefits and investment opportunities. In the long term, the strategies formulated by Telstra are aligned with the best interest of the shareholders.
SWOT Analysis
Strengths
In terms of tangible resources, Telstra has extensive network infrastructure. This enables Telstra to provide high coverage and efficient network to their customers. More importantly, Telstra has more than …show more content…
280 owned Telstra branded stores and licensed shops across Australia, which provides more convenience for customers to connect with Telstra’s customer service centre and allows a faster response time to resolve customers’ problems. Moreover, Telstra has a strong financial resource. Its revenue grew at an annual rate of 1.1% over the previous fiscal year. This strong financial position supports Telstra in making new investments on expanding and upgrading its network.
In terms of intangible resources, Telstra has a high reputation of being the leading telecom company in Australia and its high quality customer service for both personal and business customers. This is due to Telstra’s capacity of providing a large number of highly trained support staff and highly qualified technicians. Without these highly qualified employees, Telstra would not be able to establish friendly relationships with their customers and assist customers in effectively and efficiently solving their problem.
Providing full service coverage (in particular through its rural coverage), offering voice calls, broadband, and mobile data both in Australia and around the globe is quite rare and valuable. There is no other telecom company in Australia that has the capacity to provide such services. Thus, Telstra’s tangible resources and intangible resources enable Telstra to have competencies that are non-substitutable and costly to imitate as it is not easy to possess the latest technology and to get access and permission to a more upgraded network. For competitors to compete they need to make substantial investments into upgrading the network and receive the authorisation from the government.
Weaknesses
The major weakness is the declining performance of Telstra wholesale. Although it appears that the mobile sector did fairly well, the overall performance is not as good as expected. If the performance keeps declining, it will not only affect Telstra’s share price but also investor confidence.
Another weakness is the lack of initiative to diversify internationally. Telstra has businesses around the world, which is mostly inclined towards the Asian market. However, Telstra’s presence in the Asia Pacific region is not as well-known as in Australia. To be more successful in the global market, Telstra should aim to imitate the operational strategies adopted in Australia as a starting block. In Australia, US provider Verizon focuses on serving businesses.
Opportunities
Telstra operates in the telecommunications industry, with the overall industry trend being the ability to expand and upgrade the network, for example by implementing a new 4G ‘Long Term Evolution’ (LTE) network.
By expanding its 4G network coverage areas and its related services, the number of potential customers for Telstra increases. From the social perspective, as more people are increasingly reliant on telecommunication, there will be increased demand for related products and services such as the streaming of music and movies.
Furthermore, by being part of the government’s National Broadband Network agreement with a vision of offering fibre optic internet, Telstra has created a further opportunity of unlocking the full potential of its integrated devices and services. For example, the T-Box allows easy access to high definition streaming and recording of live television and movies while the T-Hub 2 is a wireless touch-screen home phone. The ability to invest in new growth businesses is a pivotal
opportunity.